Monday, February 23, 2004

If you don't find this article depressing, you're probably not the type who'd enjoy my list of links and snark. In other words, I can't describe precisely what is wrong here, especially because this sort of thing has been going on for a while.

Perhaps I'm sad because it makes concrete the huge disappointment Manhattan is becoming. The mayor describes life here as "a luxury good," and everyone on the isle seems to agree. I've got nothing against rich people in New York -- they've always run things here -- but I am strongly against the fact that there are no neighberhoods left in the borough that yuppies are afraid to walk through at night. I'm not asking for violence, for street crime, for poverty -- just some of that miracle cure authenticity... so I suppose I am for poverty. Or at least realistic standards of wealth.

Look -- it was a commonly accepted division for many years. The rich uptown and the poor downtown. Midtown was for those minor literary celebrites who lived rich but didn't actually have the bank account to back it up. I hoped, in my naive adolescent fantasy, to start out a romantic downtown punk, then to build my way up to comfortable midtown and write Talk of the Town pieces about eccentric old New Yorkers and how things aren't as New York as they used to be.

What am I supposed to do now? Move to Williamsburg and write for Vice?

Ugh. I'll have to switch to fantasy Plan B and become a Minneapolitan recluse. Don't look for Paul in ol' St. Paul and all that.